Read a Preview about Brain Injury Rehabilitation

Family caregivers and brain injury survivors will be interested in Janet Cromer’s memoir. Professor Cromer Learns to Read: A Couple’s New Life after Brain Injury chronicles our seven year journey to build a new identity, marriage, and life after brain injury.

This chapter excerpt takes place in Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital two months after Alan’s cardiac arrest when evaluations showed damage to many parts of Alan’s brain.

Everything in rehabilitation is a series of links, like a long chain. Jennifer, Alan’s speech-language pathologist, explained that before Alan could even begin to learn to read, she would need to find a way to connect with him and get him to focus his attention for several minutes. Working on attention and memory would have to come before working on reading. Before he could sit calmly to pay attention, the room had to be very quiet, he had to be physically comfortable, and the people with him had to speak softly and move slowly.

Reading is one of the most complex neurological processes human beings are capable of learning. For Alan, it all started with the alphabet. Jennifer began with random letters Alan was already scribbling, telling him the name of the letter, and sounding it out. She wrote out the whole alphabet and sounded out the letters. He was fascinated by the sight of the alphabet. He started by tracing over the shapes of letters we had drawn, gripping his pencil and moving slowly and methodically.

Then he moved on to connecting the spaces in letters shaped by dashes. The hardest, but most satisfying part was copying the letter below the one written by Jennifer. Each progression took concentrated effort and hours of practice.

Alan was trying to learn the alphabet at the same time he was learning to walk and count money and tell time and hold a conversation and remember who he was. Alan practiced his writing around the clock. When I arrived in the morning he would be asleep amidst the labors of his nocturnal scribbling. He covered the sheets, tissue boxes, old menus, and any available surface with his letters and words.

A B C D E F G FF E H…

During the day we sang the alphabet song countless times. Yes, that universal song, “A-B-C-D…” became the soundtrack to our days as we sang it over and over, matching each letter to a note. We practiced writing and sounding out words intensively.

Alan’s debut performance came on the morning of September 6^th. As I entered his room, he sprang from the bed, stretched his arms wide, and gleefully sang “A-B-C-D-E-F-G…” all the way through to the end, with no mistakes!
I have never been more proud of my husband! I really mean it. His other academic accomplishments paled in comparison to the effort of learning the alphabet. Eight weeks after his cardiac arrest and brain injury, Alan had his letters back.

Now we could move on to learning to read, and the dozens of other problems Alan still faced.